How re-written and warped is our perception of world history?

What appears in history books is not the real history of the world. Real history is conducted in secret and is almost never documented. Real history revolves around a handful of power-players, together with a small number of secret societies and closed associations. Real history is all about conspiracies whereas history, as it appears in books, resembles a crime scene investigation. Events take place and historians come along later and try to work out what caused those events. But while crime scene investigators have elaborate scientific techniques to help them gather decisive forensic evidence, historians have access only to what is available in the public record and even that is often unreliable.

If there is no public record, historians have nothing to fall back on other than their imagination. They create a narrative to link the events, to establish cause and effect. But that’s all it is – a narrative, a story. It’s not the truth. The real causes are always concealed from the gaze of history. Only a fool would take a historian’s interpretation of events as reality. History is as meaningful as literary criticism. Historians are always unreliable narrators.